Cover Art of 2008

At this year's Bouchercon in Indianapolis in October, an Anthony award will be given for the first time for the best cover art of 2008. Authors agonize about their covers, which can make such an impact on the book buyer or reader, for good or ill. The bigger the publisher, the less likely it is that the author will have any say about the cover. We've all heard horror stories. And sometimes we strike it lucky, and an artist, photographer, and/or designer captures a perfect and memorable illustration of the author's vision. I've invited any and all authors who loved their 2008 covers to display them here. Note that we are not connected with the Anthonys in any way, just giving as many 2008 covers as we can a little wider circulation.

If you registered early for Bouchercon and therefore have a ballot to vote for nominees (not winners) for the Anthonys, note that you have to include the format (hardcover, trade paper, or mass market paperback) for your picks. If you don't have the books, you can get that info on Amazon. Sorry, authors, I forgot to ask you to include it--you can add it in a comment on this post.

An unexpected number of authors did love their 2008 covers. Here's a big batch of those covers, and I'll post more next Thursday. I'll start with mine.

Elizabeth Zelvin, Death Will Get You Sober (hardcover)


Jeffrey Marks, Anthony Boucher: A Biobibliography


Jeff Cohen, It Happened One Knife



Eric Stone, Flight of the Hornbill


Julie Kramer, Stalking Susan


Deborah Shlian, Rabbit in the Moon


Laura Elvebak, Less Dead


Betty Webb, Desert Cut


Kathy Lynn Emerson, How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries


Betty Sullivan LaPierre, The Lure of the Witch


C.J. Lyons, Lifelines (paperback original)


Lou Allin, And On the Surface Die


Jeri Westerson, Veil of Lies (hardcover)


Louise Ure, The Fault Tree (hardcover)


Vicki Lane, In A Dark Season (mass market paperback original)


Roberta Isleib, Asking For Murder (paperback original)


Elaine Viets, Clubbed to Death (hardcover)


Marilyn Meredith, Kindred Spirits


Mary Jane Maffini, The Cluttered Corpse


Baron Birtcher, Angels Fall (hardcover)


Clare Langley-Hawthorne, The Serpent and the Scorpion


Renée Gardner, And the Dog Took the Cat


I.J. Parker, The Hell Screen


Linda Richards, Death Was the Other Woman


Chester Campbell, The Marathon Murders (hardcover & trade paper)


Pat Browning, Absinthe of Malice (trade paperback)


Mary Reed and Eric Mayer, Seven for a Secret


Deborah Sharp, Mama Does Time


James R. Benn, Blood Alone


Visit again next Thursday, March 26, for more 2008 covers the authors loved.

Kerry Greenwood & the Fabulous Phryne Fisher

Interviewed by Sandra Parshall

Kerry Greenwood, a major crime fiction writer in her native Australia, has also gained an enthusiastic following in the U.S. for her mysteries set in the 1920s and starring the fabulously wealthy, always fashionable Phryne Fisher. After a false start with another U.S. publisher, the Phryne (pronounced Fry-knee, rhymes with briny) novels have been published in quick succession by Poisoned Pen Press, complete with the dazzling original covers from the Allan & Unwin editions in Australia. The latest is Murder in the Dark, released this month. Next is Murder on a Midsummer Night, out this summer. PPP also publishes Kerry’s new contemporary series featuring Corinna Chapman.

Kerry was born in Footscray, a suburb of Melbourne, and lives there today. Although she had always aspired to be a writer, she earned a law degree from Melbourne University and continues to work one day a week for Victorian Legal Aid. She lives with three cats (Attilla, Belladonna, and Ashe), a collection of 7,000 books, and a registered wizard. In her spare time she has jumped out of planes in an attempt to cure her fear of heights, but only succeeded in giving herself a fear of jumping out of planes. She says she can detect bookshops from blocks away, and the size of her book collection lends credence to the claim.


Q. How did your arrangement with Poisoned Pen Press come about? Had you ever been published in the US before PPP picked up your books?

A. In the dim and distant past, i.e. 1991, Ballantine picked up the first two Phryne books, renamed Cocaine Blues [to] Death by Misadventure and they failed to sell. Then PPP contacted my Aus publisher and this time I caught the public taste, it appears. Thank you, public!

Q. Your covers are gorgeous – and so are the gowns Phryne wears. Who designs the gowns and who creates the covers?

A. My mother and I design the gowns and the amazing Beth Norling does the pictures. She sketches first then does a pastel. They are wonderful and so very actually 1928.

Q. Phryne seems ideally suited to her time. Why did you choose the 1920s? Could you write a character like Phryne in a 21st century setting?

A. Not really. Phryne is the product of the losses of the Great War, the sudden elevation of women because there were few men, and she is bold but not impossible for that period. It's not as easy as it used to be to be bold in the 21st century...

I picked 1928 initially because I did a thesis length essay on the 1928 strike for Legal History, and I over-researched it, interviewed all the old men who were on the wharf, read all the newspapers, fell in love with original research. My father was a wharfie so I could and did get into the Waterside Workers Federation archives. So when I was looking for a historical period I naturally thought of 1928.

Q. Does Phryne have qualities, or attitudes, that you consider distinctly Australian? Or would she be equally at home in 1920s America or Britain?

A. That is a really good question. I suppose her Aus qualities are a certain contempt for authority and perhaps her appetite for a good time. But she would fit in wherever she was - or rather, stand out. In England at the time she would be a Bright Young Thing and considered outrageous enough not to be invited to certain events - she would not get to meet the King, for example. In the USA at the time she would be overbold - and no one then would accept a Chinese lover, though it would have been worse if Lin was black. In fact, it would be illegal.

Q. Like many mystery heroines, Phryne is larger than life, an idealized woman. Is she someone you’d like to have as a friend? Other than lots of money, does she have anything that you wish you had?

A. Oh, that total uninterest in what anyone else thinks - I would love to have that. Her style. Her taste. Her hats! I would be delighted if she was my friend. In fact, she is. She sits on the corner of my desk and tells me stories.

Q. Tell us about the life of a writer in Australia. Are literary agents vital there, as they are in the US? Is it possible to find a publisher and have a writing career without an agent? I also wonder if you feel the same pressure American writers feel to get out in public, do bookstore signings, interviews, everything you possibly can to sell books. How much promotion do you do for your books?

A. I had an agent when I began, and I think an agent is a good thing, but not essential, in Australia. I used to do a great deal of publicity, tours, signings, radio and TV etc. When I was younger I thought it was great fun. Then I got older and menopause ran over me like a big black truck and I got too sick and exhausted to do any but the main interviews. My publisher does not press me to do more than I think is wise, because they want me to continue to write books...

Q. What attracted you to the mystery genre? What can you do in a mystery that you couldn’t do in mainstream fiction?

A. You can provide a story which everyone wants to read right through to the end. The trouble with lit fiction is that post-modernism has disjuncted (is that a word? It ought to be) or perhaps I mean dislocated the narrative, so you can't read it in bed. Mysteries are one of the few forms of fiction left that demand a story, and I am a story teller. I am in good company. Dickens, for a start.

Q. Have you ever studied writing, or have you learned on the job, so to speak? Do you believe formal instruction in writing gives an author an advantage?

A. Never studied writing, just wrote a lot of books, and when I was a child I used to read dictionaries and cornflakes packets and everything I could get my hands on. I did do a university degree in arts, though, including English, which sharpens the mind and broadens the horizons. I read, for example, Mrs. Gaskell, whom otherwise I might not have met. A writing class can teach grammar and spelling and sentence construction and they are all good things, because without them the story is not told in its most effective form. Depends on the person...

Q. You’re incredibly prolific. How long does it take you to write a book? Are you already thinking about the next one as you write? Do you take a break between books or just dive into a new one right away? Do you write every day?

A. I can only think of one book at a time and I think and research for about three months and then I write the book when it demands to be written. In its extreme form, a novel takes three weeks with no time out for sleep and a staggering intake of coffee. Now that I am supervised firmly by my cat Belladonna, who hits the caps lock when I have been typing for more than three hours, a novel takes a couple of months. And what you see is what you get. I have no drafts. I just describe what I can see in front of my eyes, like a film. Insane, I know, but it works and now, after fifty novels, I trust it.

Q. Would you tell us a bit about your new series? This doesn’t mean the end of Phryne, does it?

A. No, Phryne continues. The new series is a cosy set in the present about Corinna Chapman, who is the same size as me (fat) and is a baker in the city of Melbourne. She has several cats, a lover called Daniel, and she lives in an eccentric apartment house called Insula. Unlike Phyrne, Corinna is not a hero. She makes mistakes. She gets things wrong. She's refreshing to write about...

Q. What current crime fiction writers do you admire?

A. Love that Janet Ivanovich. Read Kathy Reichs (though I prefer the character in Bones, perhaps because she gets to work with David Boreanz). Admire Susan Wittig Albert, Donna Leon, Tony Hillerman.

Q. I read somewhere that you have a collection of more than 7,000 books. I’m unspeakably envious, but at the same time I want to ask the same question people asked the woman who gave birth to octuplets: Did you plan this, or did it just happen? What’s in your collection? Have you read all of them? If you wanted a particular book, could you find it easily?

A. They accreted, like a coral reef. Gradually. I haven't moved house for a long time, which may explain it. I know where everything is because the poetry is all in one place, as is the history, the male and female biogs, the detective stories, the science fiction, the research books. I have certainly read all of them, the collection is the books I read and decided I wanted to read again. Every now and again I have a huge purge, give away armloads, and when I look back I still have just as many books and no space in the shelves... there may be something magical in this.

Q. You have many fans in the United States. Do you think you’ll ever come over for a visit and meet some of them?

A. At the moment I have an affliction of the middle ear which makes it impossible for me to fly long distances. If this gets better or someone offers me a cruise, I would love to come to America.

Visit the author's website at www.phrynefisher.com

Wearing of the Green

Sharon Wildwind

Dia’s Muire agus Padraic duit.

Of course I’m jumping the gun by starting a conversation with that sentence. According to my Buntús Cainte: a first step in spoken Irish, the first person to speak simply invokes God’s blessing, “Dia duit.” The second person takes it up a notch with “Dia’s Muire duit.” The third person builds to, “Dia’s Muire agus Padraic duit.” I think—don’t quote me on this—there is a fourth form, which invokes not only God, Mary, and St. Patrick, but St. Columba as well. Perhaps Bishop Blackie Ryan would know.

Anyway, you get the idea: each person speaking has to add a little, not only to get the last word, but to make sure that each response tops, ever so slightly, what the previous speaker said.

Sure and could I be doing a St. Patrick’s day blog without mentioning the green? Only I’m not going to write about any of those forty shades that supposedly dot the Emerald Isle. Let’s talk about that green-eyed . . . monster. Jealousy.

I spend a lot of time being jealous of fellow writers. There is a high correspondence between who I’ve just finished reading, or am currently reading, and the jealousy quotient. Except some time the jealousy lingers far after I’ve scarfed down everything a writer has to offer.

Take Stephen Booth. He was one of the authors I picked to read in 2007 and two years later, I’m still green-pea jealous about his skill in making geography and atmosphere characters in his novels. I can’t say that his books made me immediately want to book the next flight to Great Britain’s Peak District, but that’s not what he’s after. He’s writing terrific police procedurals, not travelogs.

Ditto on the jealous side for Margaret Maron and Vicki Lane. Their geography is North Carolina: the Piedmont for Maron and western North Carolina for Lane. They not only have that the land down pat, but the culture and the rapidly-disappearing historic speech patterns.

Traveling in time rather than space, I put Anne Parker and Jana G. Oliver at the top of my people to envy list. Parker sets her books in the Leadville, Colorado of 1879-1880. I confess that I’m a real historical novel snob. If I know something about a historical period, and the writer gets details even a little wrong, it diminishes the book’s pleasure for me. I haven’t caught Parker out yet and I don’t expect to. Oliver anchors her time-travel mysteries with one end in 2057 and the other in 1888 London. I feel as though I am watching her characters flit from the future to the past and back again like a spectator watching world-class tennis at Wimbledon. Game, set, and match.

My husband and his friends who compete in western martial arts have a saying, “On any given day.” What it means is that, on any given day—usually o-dark-thirty on a Saturday—when packing to leave for an event, a competitor know that today’s outcome will be decided, in part, by today being a spectacular day for him or a rotten day for the other guy.

When I think about all of these writers, I know—on any given day—that I’m just as good as they are. I can turn out a line, a paragraph, sometimes even a whole chapter that could proudly stand beside one of theirs. I’m jealous because I want to be, all the time—every line, every paragraph, every book—as good as they are. I want other people to read something I’ve written and say with a groan, “I wish I’d written that.”

Isn't it lovely the way writers are always pushing the quality of the writing up a notch, playing off of the strengths of other writers!
_______
Quote for the week:
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?
~Robert Browning, poet
______



May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face;
the rains fall soft upon your fields and until we meet again,
may God hold you in the palm of His hand.

Psychic Moments, Soothsayers, and Computerized Mind-Reading

by Julia Buckley
I wrote to my friend John Dandola this weekend saying that I dreamed I went to his anniversary party, and that he had three sons (he doesn't) who sang for him and his wife at the celebration. There was more bizarre detail, and I mostly e-mailed him because it was funny. He then wrote back that it was odd I'd contacted him just then, because he'd been thinking about me a great deal, and this last week in particular.

Moments like these send me back to my questions about the human brain and its potential for mind-melding. Have you ever had those moments where you are about to call someone, and your phone rings, and it's that person?

The best example I have of the mindreading thing goes back to my early days of teaching, when I was fresh out of the wrapper and working in a Catholic school. The little old nun in charge of the AV equipment was named Sister Theresa Rose, and she was very sweet. I once went into the AV lab to sign out a VCR for my class. I had lately been plagued by some unexpected and severe back pain, and I was worried about it, since I was only twenty-something and not prone to this sort of thing. However, I hadn't really told anyone about it. When I entered her domain on this day, Sister Theresa Rose looked at me and said, "Oh, Julia, I've been thinking about you! I had a dream that you were suffering from sciatica."

That's just one example, of course, but it's always stayed with me because I believed at the time that she, a spiritual person, had tapped into something in me.

Interestingly, scientists believe that mind-reading is something that can be done even by computer, and in fact it is being used more and more in the detection of crime. There are Orwellian implications of this, but it certainly would go far to answer some of the mysteries that have, in the past, remained unsolved. According to this Newsweek article, when a witness is being 'read,' "The detective is careful not to mention the murder weapon. Once the suspect has conjured up the scene, the detective asks him to envision the weapon. Pay dirt: his pattern of brain activity screams "hammer" as loud and clear as if he had blurted it out."

The article also suggests, though, that people's mind patterns are remarkably similar: "If what your brain does when it thinks about an igloo is almost identical to what mine does, that suggests the possibility of a universal mind-reading dictionary, in which brain-activity pattern x means thought y in most people." This, then, would allow a computer to read minds by noting brain activity on a brain scan. But is it also what allows people to "read" each other's minds? Or must we believe that every time we have seemingly psychic moments, they are coincidental?

There is, after all, the concept of intuition, which has always existed. How did ancient people define it? In honor of the date, I'll reference Shakespeare's famous soothsayer in Julius Caesar, who warned Caesar to "Beware the Ides of March." Was he acting on intuition? Shakespeare called him a "seer," and many ancient Greek plays reference this idea. How then, did the seers get their ability? Can anyone tap into this phenomenon?

And my final question for the day (geez, all prompted by one innocent e-mail!) is: What have been your experiences with "psychic" moments?

Winner!

Karen Brees won the drawing for a free copy of one of my books. Karen, I've emailed you, so let me know which book you want and where to send. Lonnie

The Dreaded Book Tour

By Vicki Delany, guest blogger


Before I became a writer I imagined the book tour as follows:

· T day minus one month – Receive schedule of appearances from publisher.
· T Day minus three weeks – Receive airline tickets and hotel reservations from publisher.
· T Day minus two weeks – Shop for suitable clothes for appearances.
· T Day minus two weeks – Send receipts for new clothes to publisher.
· T Day minus one week – Receive list of newspaper and radio interviews from publisher.
· T Day minus two days – Check ink levels in good pen.
· T Day minus one day – Pack suitcase and go to bed early.
· T Day – Be ready on time for limo pickup for drive to airport.
· Duration of Book Tour: Have fun, meet people and talk about books and writing.

Now that I am a writer, I know that the book tour goes as follows:

· T Day minus 6 months - Send introductory e-mail to every bookstore and library in target area.
· T Day minus 5.5 months – Follow up every e-mail with telephone call.
· T Day minus 5.5 months to T-Day minus 1 month -- Follow up phone call with another phone call. Repeat.
· T Day minus 3 months – Notice that book store A is 8 hours drive from book store B, and the signing at bookstore A finishes one half hour before the signing at book store B begins.
· T Day minus 3 months – Juggle appearances on three days surrounding screw-up mentioned above.
· T Day minus 1 month – Write date and time on postcards for bookstores to hand out.
· T Day minus 2 weeks – Go on Internet to arrange car rental. Be shocked at the cost.
· T Day minus 1 week – See doctor for hand cramp caused by all that writing on postcards.
· T Day minus 6 days – Go to bank to withdraw cash for trip.
· T Day minus 6 days – PANIC.
· T Day minus 5 days – Receive notice from airline that flight has been rescheduled. It now leaves at 3:45 AM.
· T Day minus 2 days – Try on suitable clothes for being centre of attention. Suck in belly. Sigh heavily.
· T Day – Get up early; drive to airport; pay enormous amount for long-term parking; wait hours to board plane; wait more hours for plane to depart.
· Duration of Book Tour: Have fun, meet people and talk about books and writing.

Vicki and Deborah Turrell Atkinson are visiting Hawaii and the western U.S. to promote their new mysteries, Valley of the Lost and Pleasing the Dead. Details can be found at Booktour (www.booktour.com/author/vicki_delany) Vicki’s trailer for Valley of the Lost is on Youtube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOJ4m391LZQ

Your face on . . .

By Lonnie Cruse

Is your face on Facebook? Mine is. Well, okay, my book cover is. As well as MySpace, Squidoo, Crimespace, and Shelfari. And others. Are you there? Are we friends?

This weekend I saw a warning on the Internet that some of these public Internet spaces, particularly Facebook, are under attack by hackers. They somehow manage to take the profile of one person, and using that person's "friend's list" send emails to those friends urging them to click a fake YouTube link. IF you click on the link, you receive a warning that your FLASH abilities need to be updated and to click this link. DO NOT click on any links like this. It installs a worm or virus on your computer and to date there is NO cure for this virus.

Given the economy and the cost of promoting any author's books, the Internet is currently the best and cheapest way to promote our books and for readers to find/connect with us. Practically every author I know puts up information on these types of websites. And then they connect with other authors to become "friends." But doing so puts us all at great risk for damaging and disabling the very computers we depend on to do business, be it selling books, ordering items, or paying our bills. Scary. Dangerous. But, sigh, necessary.

So, do you subscribe to any of the above social networks? And if so, how do you protect yourself? Please share with us, we'd love to hear from you.

Incidentally, I'm in a mood to celebrate. I've just signed a contract with Five Star to publish the second Kitty Bloodworth mystery, FIFTY-SEVEN TRAVELING, due out July 2010. Share your thoughts on keeping us all safe on the Internet, and particularly on these social networks, and I'll draw a name from the comments section tomorrow morning and send the winner a free copy of my first in the series, FIFTY-SEVEN HEAVEN. OR if you happen to have that book already, I'll send you a copy of any of the four books in my first series, the Metropolis Mystery series. If you are named as winner, please be sure to email me your address. Click the email link on my homepage, http://www.lonniecruse.com

The Voice in the Author’s Head

Elizabeth Zelvin

In my alternate persona as a therapist, I was trained to ask, when a client claimed he (or she) kept hearing voices, “Do the voices come from inside or outside your head?” If the voices came from outside, chances were the client had a thought disorder, such as schizophrenia. (Obviously, I got my training well before the cell phone era began.) So I wasn’t too terribly freaked out when, having developed my series protagonist, recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler, I began to hear his voice at odd moments on the inside of my head. The more I wrote about Bruce (four novels and four short stories so far, though not all are published yet), the more distinctive his voice became.

I’ve just opened at random the notebook I keep on my night table, along with a self-illuminating pen, to write down those middle-of-the-night thoughts. Here’s the first entry that caught my eye.

Bruce: X’s supercilious expression would have looked good on a camel.

I don’t know who X is. I’ve never transcribed the line to a computer file or used it in a manuscript. But it sure is something I know that Bruce would say.

Now, here’s a passage that never made it into Death Will Help You Leave Him, the book that will come out in the fall. I forgot about it once I’d written it down in the middle of the night. Bruce and his ex-wife Laura are breaking into her boyfriend’s apartment. Bruce has been complaining that Laura has no sense of irony.

I hoped we weren’t going to end up in jail over this little expedition.

“What’s the sense of giving up jumping turnstiles if you have me breaking into apartments?”

“You pay the fare now? Oh, Bruce, that’s funny.” Laura’s deep laugh rang out.

Okay, so she did have a sense of irony.

Are you beginning to get the hang of Bruce? He sure doesn’t sound like me—and to me, that’s the miracle of “voice” in fiction. Here are some lines from that scene that did make it into the book. They’re climbing up the fire escape to get into the apartment.

I needed a smoke. A guy’s gotta do something with the anxiety. Prayers to my Higher Power for guidance in breaking and entering didn’t seem quite appropriate.

A little later on, he says, “I don’t recommend breaking and entering sober.”

Fellow author Susan Froetschel described the process very well in an interview on Poe's Deadly Daughters a while back. She said: “The conversation comes naturally, just spills out, and I often must use a heavy hand to cut the dialogue. And as the story unfolds, the characters can surprise even me with what they say and do. Once I get to know them, their reactions just pop into my head.”

That’s it precisely. Recently I revised a manuscript that I hope will become the third book in the series. Bruce and his friends Barbara and Jimmy are at an elegant party in the Hamptons. Barbara can get a little too earnest about recovery, and as a world-class codependent, she can always think of a way to fix or improve someone else. Jimmy has been in AA a long time and takes its principles and slogans very seriously. Bruce, on the other hand, tends to maintain a certain level of skepticism.

It had been a while since I’d read over the first draft of this manuscript. I couldn’t quite remember how the scene went, but, pen in hand, I read this passage at the bottom of a page.

“He couldn’t shake hands,” Barbara said, “because he had a bottle of Veuve Cliquot in one hand and a flute in the other. And now he’s moved on to whiskey. I don’t suppose you or Jimmy could twelve-step him?”

“The program is for those who want it, not for those who need it,” Jimmy said as he came up behind us. “Attraction, not promotion.”

I read those AA catch phrases (completely in character for Jimmy at that moment), and I thought, I know exactly what Bruce would say: “Yeah, yeah.”

I turned the page, and there was the next line, in Bruce’s narrative voice:

Yeah, yeah.

As Susan Froetschel puts it, his reaction popped into my head, as it had when I wrote the first draft. In this case, it wasn’t clever or complicated, but I’m absolutely sure it’s what Bruce would have said in the circumstances. And in revision, what she says about cutting the dialogue, heavily if necessary, is true for me too. In the first draft, I need to pour it all out without censoring myself. Not every writer works this way, but many do. In revision, I have to “kill my darlings.” It’s taken me a long time to learn not to cling to every well-turned phrase. But it’s become a lot easier since I learned to recognize Bruce’s voice. No matter how much I loved a line when I wrote it, if it’s Not Bruce, I cut it.

Tweet!

Sandra Parshall

What would Ernest Hemingway have said if he had tweeted?

What topics would Edgar Allan Poe have blogged about?

What would James M. Cain’s Facebook page have looked like?

It's difficult to imagine how writers managed to sell books in the pre-computer era. How did they get by without web sites? And weren't they awfully lonely without the internet?

The social networking and online marketing made possible by computers and the internet have become so much a part of the writing life that many of us feel we can’t have a career at all if we aren’t plugged in, tweeting, blogging, and constantly updating readers. Writers are everywhere on the internet, blabbing about ourselves. This has a definite downside. We’re like the movie stars who appear on public streets with torn jeans, two-day beards, and dirty hair.

The mystery is gone.

We have no secrets left because we’ve used them to fill the insatiable maw of the blog machine. We’ve written about our bad habits, our phobias, our food fetishes, our pets (alive and dead), our siblings, our parents, our spouses, our kids, the bully who beat us up in sixth grade, the teacher-nun who humiliated us in eighth grade, the waiter who served us with lukewarm coffee and a bad attitude, the drycleaner who ruined our favorite coat, our hangnails. If there’s anything left that our fans don’t know about our lives, all they have to do is wait. Eventually it will all become blog material.

And we complain, incessantly, that we don’t have enough time to write.

How easy the writing life was before the internet existed. Sit down at a typewriter and write – that was it. No e-mail to answer, no Twitter followers to connect with, no blog to produce, no web site or MySpace page to update. I can’t help wondering how certain writers from those pre-internet days would have coped with the demands made on 21st century writers.

Hemingway would have been a natural for Twitter. A limit of 140 characters per tweet? No problem for Papa. And he could have blogged about his six-toed cats. (Hey, I’ve blogged about Hemingway’s cats – see note below – so why wouldn’t he?) William Faulkner would have had a little more trouble with Twitter.

Truman Capote was born to blog – but born too early, alas. Imagine the feuds that inveterate gossip could have ignited, and kept going indefinitely, if he’d written a daily blog. Give Norman Mailer a blog at the same time and we’d really have something interesting going on.

What writers from the past do you think would have embraced today’s online promotional opportunities? Who would have fled in horror from the mere suggestion of blogging and tweeting?

If Agatha Christie had been addicted to blogging, would she have kept in touch during her mysterious 10-day disappearance?

Was Raymond Chandler a MySpace kind of guy, or would he have preferred Facebook?

Would Arthur Conan Doyle have named his blog for himself, or would he have called it holmesmysteries.com?

And what would Hemingway have said if he’d tweeted?

****************************
NOTE: I wrote a while back about the USDA’s efforts to remove the 50 or so cats from the Hemingway property, now a museum, on Key West. (Please don’t ask how the Department of Agriculture became involved. I’m as baffled as you undoubtedly are.) If you haven’t read about the resolution already, you might like to know that the five-year battle ended with construction of a fence to keep the felines from wandering off the grounds. Most of the cats are descendants of Snowball, a six-toed cat Hemingway received as a gift in 1935. The USDA concluded that they are healthy, happy, and well cared for by the museum staff.

Is This Book Necessary?

Sharon Wildwind

Recently I read a long interview that Jofie Ferrari-Adler, an editor at Grove/Atlantic, conducted with four young editors. This was published on the web site, Poets and Writers.

Here’s part of the response that Eric Chinski gave to a question about what besides the written page or the author’s skill or her obsession compels an editor to purchase a manuscript. Mr. Chinski is vice-president and editor-in-chief of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, a long-time publisher known for its literary fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and children’s literature.

“The word necessary always comes to mind for me. Beyond a good story, beyond good writing, does the novel feel necessary? . . . the ones I tend to be drawn to are the ones that either feel personally necessary or globally necessary in some vague way that’s hard to define. And that should be at the sentence level, too. People who can write really well sometimes get carried away by their own writing and forget what’s actually necessary on the page. . . . Sometimes you feel like an author is just writing for the sake of writing, and that is a big turnoff. It’s got to feel necessary at every level.”

Huckleberry Finn was a necessary book. To Kill a Mockingbird. The Grapes of Wrath. I’m not sure about Moby Dick, though, no doubt, generations of high school English teachers could argue me to a stand-still on that one.

I tried to think of a globally-necessary mystery. The one that came to mind was Tess Gerritsen’s The Apprentice. With apologies to Dr. Gerritsen, it was a book that made me tremendously uncomfortable. I finished it with all of the morbid fascination people display gawking at fatality traffic accidents, which is exactly the point one of the characters makes. I saw qualities in that character’s assessment of people’s relationship to torture and death that I didn’t like recognizing in myself. It cut so close to the bone that I had more than a moment’s pause as to whether I should turn myself in for a bit of psychotherapeutic tune-up.

As writers, we have a standard list of why we read/write/enjoy mysteries. Justice is done. Crime does not pay. Murder will out. The world can be put back into alignment through the actions and sacrifice of the hero/heroine. The bigger the sacrifice, the bigger the wrong that can be righted. These ideas are embedded in culture. In countries where justice—or the lack of it—and the roles of police officers are different from the United States, Canada and Great Britain, mystery “truths” look very different.

I suspect, however, that the majority of us are writing personally-necessary stories. Each of us has a particular mix of stories and characters that won’t let us alone. They intrude during the day when we’re standing at the photocopier or doing dishes. They invade our dreams. They keep coming back until, in desperate self-defense, we have to put those stories on paper. I really hope that is what Mr. Chinski meant by a “personally-necessary” story because I think it's as close as I'm going to come to meeting the necessary criteria.

What makes a mystery necessary to you?
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Quote for the week:

I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable.
~Anne Morrow Lindbergh, author and aviator (1906-2001)